ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the most fully conventionalized aspect of the conceptual world, the conventional signs of language. From the standpoint of the language, the conceptual elements appear as the conventional meanings of the conventional linguistic signs of the language. The chapter distinguishes two kinds of meanings in the signata of linguistic signs: the senses of conventional signs and the characterizations of motivated signs. It explains three parts in ad hoc signs: a signans, a characterization and a signatum. A single signans may be paired with more than one sense, and therefore participate in more than one linguistic sign, since each different pairing of a signans with a sense defines a different linguistic sign. Therefore, what is represented in conventional dictionaries as a single lexical item may have a number of different senses each different 'meaning' defined for such an item in the dictionary being a different sense.
